In short: Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

Super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his particularly bored looking cohorts Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames get into yet another McGuffin hunt to protect the world. A shadowy evil mastermind with the usual mad-on for our hero, a handful of returning characters (Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust and Sean Harris’s Solomon Lake) and a threatened ex-wife (Michelle Monaghan again) are there and accounted for.

This six hundredth or so Mission: Tom Cruise movie directed by repeat Cruise crony Christopher McQuarrie suffers badly from contemporary blockbuster syndrome, so it concerns a perfectly serviceable McGuffin hunt that would most probably make for a pretty fantastic hundred minute movie that has been blown up to inexplicable two and a half hours by the kind of franchise universe building rarely anybody will care about, not even this fan of superhero and supercar movie minutiae.

Because this is a Tom Cruise movie, there’s really not much to do with the additional runtime for the film: interesting characterisation is difficult to impossible to do in a movie where every other character is exclusively defined through their relationship to Cruise, and the guy must even be made to look absolutely awesome when he screws up badly. Most superheroes feel more human and relatable there, though ethically, this super spy series has by now totally bought into ideas of saving the little people and not playing the game of weighing single lives against the many, which I don’t have a problem with in the “kill everyone and let god sort out his own” world too many people apparently enjoy living in.

Inside of these parameters, the first and the final act of the film are serviceably fun popcorn cinema, but the lack of actual narrative drive beyond set pieces and the series’ tendency to waste potential awesomeness that could be provided through the on paper great supporting cast (Rebecca Ferguson alone can act circles around Cruise and looks more convincing in action scenes to boot) thanks to its extreme Cruise worship. Which becomes deadly for a middle act whose action sequences are as painfully by the numbers as the ones in here. Spectacles aren’t supposed to be boring.

In short: Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

This time around, aging super spy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team of little buddies (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) who are actually allowed to do something in this outing are fighting two enemies: first, a CIA director (Alex Baldwin) who shuts down the IMF with the reasoning that they cause more harm than they prevent. Which, given the fact that the villains in three of the other four Mission Impossible movies were rogue or traitorous IMF agents, has the ring of truth to it.

Enemy number two is a sort of anti-IMF made up of a world-wide network of disgruntled spies disgusted with keeping up the status quo following the leadership of the reptilian Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). As all Mission Impossible villains, Lane is a bit obsessed with Ethan, of course.

Seemingly playing both sides – like a proper spy – is the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).

In an ideal world, this fifth Mission Impossible movie would of course hinge on the fact that its villains are absolutely right – the IMF is a bunch of idiots causing problems it then solves with grand gestures and considerable loss of life, and the status quo it is bound to uphold and its methods to do this are morally unsupportable. This being a modern blockbuster and Tom Cruise vehicle instead, Baldwin’s character is a well-meaning fool, and Lane is a movie villain.

This isn’t something I actually condemn Christopher McQuarrie’s film for, but it is something so remarkably obvious, I couldn’t help but comment on it. Coming to the film the filmmakers actually made, this is a marked improvement on the horrors of the fourth Mission Impossible, featuring interesting villains actually allowed and able to make an impression on the audience – Harris is just great – a twisty plot line that might not hold up to too much logical scrutiny but is very fun when you’re just willing to go with it, and some genuinely great action and suspense set pieces. The opera sequence alone would be worth the price of admission as a piece of high drama suspense filmmaking, but the rest of the set pieces is just as fun, well directed and exciting as it.

Coming to our the “state of the Cruise” segment, I can gladly report that the close-up hogging isn’t painfully egregious anymore, and that the movie actually has quite a few scenes for other actors to shine in during which Cruise doesn’t even make an appearance. A personal appearance, I should say, for everyone here has a curious habit of throwing in a sentence or three about how awesome/sexy/breathtakingly dangerous Ethan Hunt is, even if that’s not a pertinent question at all right then. Vanity’s an interesting thing.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has retired from the field agent life, and now teaches the next generation of IMF superspies. He does this for love, for between the last film and now, he has not just apparently dropped a certain thief, never to be mentioned by the movie, but is also now very happily engaged to nurse Julia (Michelle Monaghan), who does know nothing of espionage or his true job.

Because that’s always the way, Ethan is drawn back into field service for a rescue operation of one Lindsey Farris (Keri Russell), his former favourite spy pupil who has gotten herself into a spot of bother. Somehow some quiet observations has resulted in her getting kidnapped by the insane international arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ethan and his team – this time around Ving Rhames and Maggie Q with a bit of hometown help from Simon Pegg – manage to extract Lindsey, but she dies from an explosive capsule implanted in her head. Ethan’s out for revenge now, and while he’s at it, he might as well also grab a dangerous biological agent in Davian’s possession.

Davian’s not a man to be thwarted or threatened, however, and what’s a better move to make than threaten a superspy’s loved one? Further complications, including yet another traitor in the IMF, do of course ensue.

In Cruise years, we have now reached the point where he had acquired most of the needed acting tools for the kind of star he probably always wanted to be, and has allowed directors to tune down the frequency of shots of him grinning smugly for no good reason. Because we haven’t yet reached the 2010s, trying to come over like more of a human being – if an utterly perfect one who is good at everything, inhumanely hot, and so on, and so forth – is apparently of interest, too. Doing this by giving him a fiancée in one of those jobs Hollywood people would probably describe as “grounded” and “human”, and then threatening her is probably the least original way to go about that, apart from teaming him up with a monkey or a little child, but damn me if J.J. Abrams doesn’t do this efficiently as well as effectively. In part, the trick works as well as it does because Michelle Monaghan is really, really, good at projecting humanity back at unlikable male stars that isn’t actually coming from them, convincing us that something must actually be perfectly alright and decent with those guys. It’s a curious ability, but it works.

At least, this is the only one of the Mission Impossible movies that actually manages to make me root for Ethan instead of just watching the crazy plot contortions and absurd plans, explosions and shoot-outs he’s getting into while raising eyebrows at his boring perfection. So, while humanization by threatened significant other may be a primitive move, it does at least work.

Also livelier than in the movies before is the villain. On paper, Seymour Hoffman doesn’t actually have that much more to do than his predecessors, yet his precise performance and the greater pull of the plot sell him not just as an actual threat but also as a great counterpoint to Hunt, again making a protagonist who isn’t generally likeable more so by contrast.

The action set pieces make as little sense as we’ve grown used to from the series, but make up for that by a general sense of awesomeness and Abrams’s typical ability to shoot loud and obnoxiously conceived scenes as if they were sensible and natural. That he’s actually good with the spy bits of the superspy formula is another point in Mission Impossible III’s favour, leaving this a fine way to while away a few others.

Mission: Impossible II (2000)

Rogue IMF agent Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) and his team of rogues steal the lab-made disease “Chimera” a crazy Russian scientist made for an Australian pharma company. Given what happened in the first movie, the IMF seems to have a bit of a problem with rogue agents committing supervillainy.

Fortunately, still tiny, not quite as shouty anymore, super agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, smugly grinning like a loon for the whole first act for reasons only known to himself; the movie even makes it part of its villain’s motivation instead of telling Tom to cut it out) is put on the case. Before really starting on the mission, he is supposed to recruit sexy jewel thief Nyah Hall (the artist now known as Thandiwe Newton). The recruitment is more like a short courtship dance, and before you can doubt anyone’s professionalism, they have already copulated and fallen for each other deeply (at least for this movie). Which gets a bit awkward when Ethan’s boss (an Anthony Hopkins cameo) explains that Nyah is a former girlfriend of Ambrose’s and supposed to help them via good old sexspionage instead of thievery.

That makes Hunt so grumpy, he’s going to stop grinning for the rest of the movie, so good job there, Anthony Hopkins. But needs must, so sexspionage it is. This being a Mission: Impossible movie, a heist and various action scenes are of course going to follow.

This being a John Woo movie, a misplaced pigeon, as well.

Four years after the first MI movie, Cruise has settled into his star persona, which leaves us with less strained attempts at acting and a leading man who is quite a bit more assured in front of the camera, but also one who really insists on showing off in as many scenes as possible, and can demand to get more close-ups than, say, the rather more talented and close-up worthy Newton. There’s also at least one pointless vanity scene showing Cruise rock-climbing early on, which, combined with the antiseptic vibe of the “romance” between him and Newton’s Nyah, makes the first act a bit of a slog.

There’s little interest in team work as a core value of the franchise here anymore, either, so that the thing can turn into even more of the Cruise show.

Scott isn’t great shakes as a villain either, and never feels like the properly oversized threat towards all that is right and good in the world he needs to be to work against Cruise’s plot-armoured Hunt.

To be fair to MIII, there are a quite a few great action sequences in here, but then, great action sequences are only half of what made Woo one of the greatest action directors of all time. The other half is pairing the action with an operatic sense of melodrama, blood with tears. You can see where the film wants to deliver this all-important connection, but with a weak Scott and a Newton that’s never allowed as much space as Cruise, there’s really nobody for the film to connect Cruise with properly, so the melodrama feels hollow and never satisfies emotionally .

Mission: Impossible (1996)

A heist-favouring spy team working for an organization called the IMF (which stands for “Impossible Mission Force”, so not to be confused with the IWF, I assume) under the leadership of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), is wiped out during an operation in Prague meant to retrieve some kind of ridiculous master list the IMF has of all of their undercover spies. The situation turns out to be at least a double cross. This doesn’t just kill off some of the best actors in the cast, but leaves only one agent alive: a tiny, shouty, perpetually grinning man named Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Or so it seems at first.

This does of course leave Hunt under heavy suspicion from his superiors, and instead of rotting away in a secret prison, our protagonist decides to go on the run and find out who killed his friends while also retrieving the list. He gets help from a surprise survivor of his wiped out team, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), Phelps’s improbable wife, and a couple of burned, I mean “disavowed”, former IMF agents, Krieger (Jean Reno) and Luther (Ving Rhames). There will be heisting and an astonishing number of double crosses.

Mission: Impossible (which I pretend to take place in universe next to the original series, for reasons obvious to anyone who liked the show and has seen the movie) falls into a weird space in the career of Tom Cruise. While wielding quite a bit of star power, he didn’t have quite as much clout as to be able to bully his directors into an infinite number of close-ups of him looking heroic/constipated, even in a film he produced; though he already was able to play down the importance of every other character in his movies, resulting in a film with Reno, Béart, Rhames, Voight, and Kristin Scott Thomas that finds no space to give any of them an actual substantial scene. Only Vanessa Redgrave seems impervious to this, joyfully chewing the scenery whenever she’s on screen and flirting at Cruise in the exact same predatory manner his heroes would increasingly take on in the coming decades.

Cruise is attempting to make up for the too sharp focus on himself by trying very hard indeed, more often than not falling into a trap that comes up regularly with him during the early decades of his career when he was trying to be a proper actor as well as a movie star – he looks like a guy trying much more than one doing, grimacing and shouting when he doesn’t seem to know how to express human feelings in a more natural manner.

Ironically, the blockbuster bigness of projects like this first Mission: Impossible can’t have helped him either, for this is not a film that lends itself to attempts at being subtle and human; being appropriately big is a skill Cruise really got better in during the years following this. And really, think what you want about the guy, one can’t fault him for being a slacker.

So that leaves Mission: Impossible to be carried by its twisty passages of a curiously predictable script full of set pieces and the great Brian De Palma’s direction alone. Fortunately, De Palma in his thriller director for hire phase is brilliant in his overblown pomposity, clearly loving the technical tricks his budget affords him, finding ways to keep Cruise off-screen at least sometimes by using POV camera, and otherwise applying everything he learned from studying Hitchcock, while also adding his own ability to melodramatically heighten every action by stylish flourishes that would make them ridiculous instead of suspenseful in lesser hands.

Now, many of the set-ups for the film’s central set pieces and the heist scene everybody still seems to remember decades later are patently ridiculous when you think them through, but De Palma’s impeccable staging and timing of thrills cheap and costly makes them utterly convincing while you’re in the moment, which is all that matters in the kind of film that only ever is about its moments of excitement and the thrills that come with that. This is not at all meant as a criticism of big, loud blockbuster movies – I love rather a lot of them, older and very new – but rather an acknowledgement of what they are typically meant to be and do. Mission: Impossible does it rather well indeed, even for someone like me who only ever likes movies starring Tom Cruise despite of him and not because of him.

Three Films Make A Post: Quick on the Draw - And He Always 'Gets' His Man!

Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf, while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word “entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form. The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of lazy.

The Tournament (2009)

So, when was the point western low budget (though The Tournament is low budget compared to mainstream cinema, and not compared to your typical Steve Austin vehicle) action movies turned good again? Or have I just been unlucky these last few years and always stumbled upon the bad ones while other films provided the warm glow of explosions and the merry colour of blood I was craving? It's a thing to get philosophical about, so please insert your own description of the cruelty of the universe here.

Scott Mann's The Tournament is the latest film convincing me to ask this bundle of questions, for lo, it is pretty great. The titular tournament, managed by a Mr Powers (Liam Cunningham), takes place all seven years in varying places around the globe. In it, thirty of the world's most dangerous assassins dumb, desperate, crazy or jaded enough to play in this sort of game, are set loose in an unsuspecting town or city in a battle to the death. Everyone has an electronic capsule implanted that shows them as nice little blips on their co-contestants' cells, and makes the whole thing easier to follow for the rich perverts betting on the game via the inescapable surveillance cameras. This time around, the game takes place in a city in the North of England. To make things more interesting, this year, the capsules not only work as tracking devices but will also blow the remaining contestants up if more than one of them is still alive after twenty-four hours of bullets and explosions.

Among the contestants are depressed Hong Kong killer Lai Lai Zhen (Kelly Hu), insane Texan with a penchant for cutting off fingers Miles Slade (Ian Somerhalder), French Parkour-based killer Anton Bogart (Parkour athlete Sebastien Foucau), last game's winner Joshua Harlow (Ving Rhames) and an assortment of meat played by people like Scott Adkins (as in many of his films inexplicably cast as a Russian) and Craig Conway. Harlow retired after the last game and is only taking part in the Tournament again because somebody killed his wife, and Powers has told him the killer is among the other contestants. Violence ensues, as was to be expected.

Things get more complicated when Bogart manages to cut out his tracer and smuggle it into the coffee of the disgraced alcoholic priest Father MacAvoy (Robert Carlyle), and turn the priest into bait. Fortunately for the priest, Zhen quickly realizes that he isn't an actual contestant, and even better for him, unlike Powers she actually cares. So Zhen decides to protect MacAvoy from sure death, which just might turn out to be the thing that saves herself as a human being.

As I said, The Tournament is pretty great fun, despite the obvious plot holes, and its need for its audience to believe in a criminal conspiracy so effective it can not only repeatedly organize this particular type of death match but keep it covered up despite the mass slaughter going on in public. The thing is, once the film has made its set-up clear, it treats the whole bit of silliness with unblinking seriousness, which always goes a long way with me if a film wants to convince me of a silly idea or three, and leaves me with no will to argue with it. Additionally, The Tournament's action is paced in the proper break-neck speed that makes it increasingly difficult to find time to nitpick.

These action scenes are pleasantly varied in style and approach too, so you get a bit of martial arts fighting, various bloody shoot-outs (there's not much gore but oh so very much splattering blood I couldn't help but think, "analyse this, Dexter Morgan"), as well as some car stunts, all culminating in a particularly great melange of all of these things. Even better, Mann may be prone to a bit faster editing than I generally prefer yet he never loses control of the scenes, so it is at least always clear who does what to whom in which position.

Even though the film's dramatic plotlines don't sound very interesting on paper (I bet most readers have already deduced the film's two biggish twists from the plot basics I provided), they do work rather well in humanizing the core characters, be they killers or not, providing film and audience with a reason to care for what happens with them.

The film's triple redemption plot does not lay things on too thick, either. It may not be very original but it works well grounding the carnage in something relatable and human, which often makes the difference for me between a competent action movie and a great one. The Tournament, also thanks to the simple yet effective performances by Hu, Carlyle and - to a lesser degree - Rhames, is rather a great one.

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In short: Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Not to be confused with other Zombie Apocalypses. This is the Syfy/The Asylum one.

As its title oh so subtly suggests, the film takes place in the late stages of JAZA (Just Another Zombie Apocalypse, featuring all four types of zombies: fast, slow, mid-tempo and CGI tiger). After having hidden away in a hut in the woods for most of the end of the world - which makes them zombie apocalypse virgins who can be exposited to whenever necessary - Ramona (Taryn Manning), Billy (Eddie Steeples), and some zombie-chew friend of theirs emerge to wander around randomly and provoke zombies by being obnoxious and loud.

Ramona and Billy are saved from a zombie attack that kills Zombie-Chew by a merry band of effective  survivors (who'll turn ridiculously ineffective whenever the script calls for it) lead by Henry (Ving Rhames) and Cassie (Lesley-Ann Brandt). The survivors adopt the two slackers, and together they go on their way to Catalina where there's supposedly a zombie-free area to be found. On their way, the group goes through all the zombie movie standards, except for the dialogue about how much women suck popularized by The Walking Dead.

Curiously, Zombie Apocalypse is another SyFy-produced movie I don't utterly loathe. Even stranger, it's also a The Asylum production that looks like an actual movie. Sure, the film's script, written by Brooks Peck and Craig Engler who were also responsible for that other SyFy movie that was at least entertaining crap, seems to be out to remove as much subtextual complexity from zombie cinema as possible while going through all the genre's clichés and presenting all its expected set pieces, but at least it's doing that with a degree of competence and love for (alas, CGI-infested) cheap zombie carnage that's actually pretty entertaining to watch. Plus, this is one of the few horror movies I've seen that contains more than one person of colour in a central role without trying to sell itself as some sort of hip hop horror thing; this natural inclusiveness goes a long way to make up for the film's flatness in all other social and political regards.

For once in an Asylum film, the direction's not too horrible either. Director Nick Lyon actually manages to shoot decent action scenes (until the ridiculous CGI zombie tiger in the climax, that is), and is doing a job that is all-around not crap. Probably a first in the world of The Asylum.

Then there's the additional bonus of a very good low budget movie cast, doing very decent low budget movie acting. Okay, Taryn Manning's pretty horrible, but I have witnessed The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes movie and know that "pretty horrible" is still better than what this particular production company is willing to take from a lead actor.

If all this sounds as if Zombie Apocalypse's greatest virtue in my eyes is that it's not atrocious, then, well, you do understand me right. Sometimes, not being horrible is enough.

 

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